e beautiful even
than the stone-pine of Italy. Gray lavender in color, hard as though
cut from stone, swelling at the base to an incredible bulk, shooting
straight to an incredible height and tapering exquisitely as it soars,
it drops not foliage but plumage. To walk in a redwood forest at night
and to look up at the stars tangled in the tree-tops, to watch the
moonlight sift through the masses of soft black-green feathers, down,
down, until strained to a diaphanous tenuity it lies a faint silver
gossamer at your feet, is to feel that you are living in one of the old
woodcuts which illustrate Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream."

Most people in first visiting California are obsessed with the flowers,
the abundant callas, the monstrous roses, the giant geraniums. But I
never ceased to wonder at the beauty of the trees. And remember, I have
not as yet seen what they call the "big" trees.

Yes, California is quite as beautiful as her poets insist and her
painters prove. It turns everybody who goes there into a poet, at least
temporarily. Babes lisp in numbers and those of the native population
who don't actually write poetry, talk it--no matter what the subject is.
Take the case of Sam Berger. Sam Berger--I will explain for the benefit
of my women readers--was first a distinguished amateur heavyweight boxer
who later became sparring partner for Bob Fitzimmons and manager to Jim
Jeffries. In an interview on the subject of boxing, Mr. Berger said,
"Boxing is an art--just as much so as music. To excel in it you must
have a conception of time, of balance, of distance. The man who attempts
to box without such a conception is like a person who tries to be a
musician without having an ear for music."

Is it not evident from this that Mr. Berger would have become a poet if
a more valiant art had not claimed him?

In that ideal future state in which all the world-parts are assembled
and perfectly coordinated into one vast self-governing machine, I hope
that California will be turned into a great international reservation,
given over entirely to poets, lovers and honeymoon couples. It is too
beautiful to waste on mere bromidic residential or business interests.

So much for the State of California. I confess with shame that that is
all I know about it, although I reiterate that that ignorance is not my
fault. So now for San Francisco.

San Francisco!

San Francisco!

Many people do not realize that San Francisco tips a